TIL

2016

7 Sept: tail -f is awesome for watching log files, it automatically prints appended data to stdout
10 Sept: Setting "Key Repeat Rate" and "Delay Until Repeat", in the Mac keyboard settings, to the shortest possible values, makes Vim soo much nicer to use
11 Sept: make without any other arguments doesn't necessarily execute make all. It executes the first task of the Makefile. It's just the convention to put all: to the top
26 Sept: gitsh is a lot nicer than the git-extras repl
9 Nov: mosh is a great SSH replacement. It automatically reconnects after connection problems
26 Dec: xargs takes input from stdin, and passes it as a normal argument to another command. This is great for commands that ignore stdin, like rm. I always knew that xargs existed but finally took the time to see what exactly it actually does :)

7 Jan: \FloatBarrier lets LaTeX know that you want all previously defined figures to be rendered before this marker
9 Jan: The Vim command gq formats the selected text according to the Vim settings, e.g. it enforces textwidth=80. This is pretty nice for reformatting text
18 Jan: To enable viewing logging when in jupyter notebooks: import logging; logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
30 Jan: Vim: gqip to format the current paragraph. vip selects the current paragraph
26 Feb: GNU aspell is useful for spell checking LaTeX files, as well as other plain text formats like markdown

8 Apr: When using newcommand in LaTeX to define a shortcut for a phrase, xspace is very useful for ensuring proper spacing. E.g. \usepackage{xspace} \newcommand{\fl}{Federated Learning\xspace} makes sure that a space is inserted when a word follows (\fl is useful) but not when punctuation follows (\fl,).
28 Jun: Jupyter can auto-reload modules whenever they change:

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

29 Sep: Transitions in CSS are not inherited by default
7 Oct: r'' is not just for regular expressions, it's actually for raw strings. Every character other than the closing ' is taken literally. This means backslashes do not need to be escaped, which is useful for regular expressions